Course Outline for What's New in Microsoft Office 2013

Week 1

Lesson 1- Introducing Office 2013 and the Cloud

Microsoft Office 2013 adds new capabilities and a new look to the features of Office 2010. In addition, Office 2013 lets you store and work on your documents "in the cloud," making it easier to work from different locations and to share your work with others. In this lesson, you'll take a peek at the new look of Office 2013 and then learn about working with Office programs and documents in the cloud.

Lesson 2- A Tour of Word 2013 Startup and Graphics Features

Microsoft Word offers several new startup features, including a Start screen and templates. Its enhanced cloud connectivity appears when you open and save files. A new view and improved graphics capabilities make it easier to view and work with pictures and videos. In this lesson, you'll use these features in both a short and a long document

Week 2

Lesson 3- Formatting and Sharing Word Documents

Word 2013 makes working with tables easier than ever, with new border choices and a new easy way to add rows and columns. And when you finish formatting, you'll most likely want to share your documents with others, often to get their responses to your work. In this lesson, you'll learn about new Word reviewing features that make this faster. We'll explore Office apps, which help you extend what you can do in the program. You'll also learn that Word 2013 features the ability to open PDF documents so that you can edit them right inside of Word. Last, we'll look at file compatibility.

Lesson 4- ­­­­Introducing Microsoft Excel 2013

Like Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel 2013 has added some important new features that can help speed up your work. You'll see that the Excel screen elements are similar to those you saw earlier in Word. We'll also go over new data analysis tools that let you preview various data relationships before you choose one. Combine these with new chart formatting tools and the ability to create slicers from tables, and you'll find better ways of communicating your data more clearly than ever before.

Week 3

Lesson 5- ­­­­More New Excel Features

In this lesson, you'll begin by exploring changes to Excel PivotTables and PivotCharts, after a quick review. You'll also learn a great new PivotTable feature called the Timeline. We'll then move on to workbook sharing and then experience some of the new apps for Excel. Finally, you'll look at sharing workbooks and the new procedure for creating and saving you own templates.

Lesson 6- ­­­­Getting to Know New PowerPoint Graphics Tools

Today, you'll look at the PowerPoint Start screen templates and then open a presentation. There you'll learn about themes and theme variants, you'll examine new slide formats, and you'll look at how the Ribbon tabs have changed. Then you'll explore several new tools that let you add and work with graphics in less time.

Week 4

Lesson 7- PowerPoint's New Formatting, Animation, and Slide Show Features

Today, you'll gain experience in formatting slide backgrounds, formatting pictures, and presenting in Slide Show view. I'll then introduce you to the new Presenter view, which lets you practice and present your show using new tools. We'll then turn to the new comment features, which allow you to more easily exchange information with people who review your presentation. Finally, we'll look at new animation features that let you create custom animations more easily.

Lesson 8- Creating Access Web Apps

Access 2013 has one big new feature: It lets you create Web apps, which are online databases that other people can open and work with using a Web browser. In this lesson, we'll do a quick review of Access and then create two Web apps. You'll need Access 2013 and a SharePoint server address, which you can get by signing up for a free trial of an Office 365 subscription.

Week 5

Lesson 9- ­­­­Learning New Outlook Features

In this lesson, you'll look at the most important new features in Outlook 2013, including improvements to the email, contacts (now called people), calendar, and tasks areas. Some areas have been renamed, and some have gotten a new look to help you communicate more efficiently with others. Finally, we'll look at ways of customizing the screens in the major Outlook areas so that you can always have the information you need at your fingertips.

Lesson 10- ­­­­What's New With OneNote 2013

In this lesson, I'll introduce you to the basics of OneNote 2013, including creating a notebook, tabs, and pages. You'll then see the major new features, including creating and tagging text, creating tables with shading, converting tables to Excel spreadsheets, and inserting existing Excel spreadsheets. Finally, you'll learn about sending information to OneNote from other programs and exporting notebooks.

Week 6

Lesson 11- ­­­­What's New in Microsoft Publisher 2013

In this lesson, we'll look at the new features of Microsoft Publisher 2013, including new templates and new text and graphics formatting options. We'll cover fills, outlines, and special effects such as shadows, reflections, glows, and bevels. These effects offer countless combinations that let you make your text and graphics truly distinctive. You'll learn to easily swap images in a publication and make any image into a page background. Finally, you'll learn how to save any publication as a graphic file that you can send to any photo printer.

Lesson 12- Integrating Office Information

In this lesson, you'll learn how to perform basic integration techniques, which let you reuse information between the Office programs. We'll compare and contrast pasting, embedding, and linking and get some hands-on experience as you integrate spreadsheet cells and a chart into a Word report. Finally, you learn to create an entire PowerPoint presentation in an instant from a Word outline.